Category Archive: Essays
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Places Around Pittsburgh: Some Assembly Required
George B. Post’s Bank of Pittsburgh (1895) adhered to the Temple of Finance cliché in full, with a hexastyle Corinthian order boldly confronting Fourth Avenue. When the bank as a whole came down in 1944, replaced by nothing more than a parking lot, the architect Edward F. Griffith prevailed on the lot owner to let the colonnade and the façade behind it stand. Around 1960, the opportunity for re-use came, and Griffith and another architect, Maximilian Nirdlinger, acted. The elements were erected as a hypaethral tholos (a temple round and roofless) at Jefferson Memorial Park in Pleasant Hills. The old bank doorway admits you, and above rise the columns and some wall elements. -
Places Around Pittsburgh: Squeezed Villa
We are not really sure what happened at 5510 Centre Avenue, but the story seems to go like this. Someone had an old house, dating from the 1860s to judge from the concave sides of its mansard and gambrel roofs. It stood back from the street some 20 feet apart, and about 1930 someone decided to build two store blocks right on the street, one quoined and one crenellated to give the ensemble some class. This led the owner of the house, whether different or not, to create a villa-like effect with an arcaded portico, a horseshoe stair to street level, a miscellany of Classical decoration, and a little shrubbery, so that an air of graciousness resulted despite everything. The Japanese have perfected the art of simulating a full landscape in a little courtyard, and this beset property in Bloomfield had made a nice try at the same thing.—Walter C. Kidney
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Places Around Pittsburgh: How to Terminate a Tall Building
Go to Forbes Avenue behind Warner Centre on a bright morning around 10 o’clock, and look toward Fourth Avenue: splendid architecture rises before you, the upper flourishes of tall buildings as these were conceived in the 1900s. Here is a variety of capitals in the old base-shaft-capital formula of tall-building design—the ultimate bit of fantasy on a tall building that still encloses workaday space for the most part but that in addition concludes the composition and announces the building from afar. Here, to the far right, the bright metal muntins and reflective glass of PPG Place suggest an alternative means: tracery that pierces, and seems to be penetrated by the sky.
—Walter C. Kidney
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Places Around Pittsburgh: Gothic Terminations
A view down Ellsworth Avenue, when the trees are bare, gives quite a Gothic impression. Closest is the more or less Tudor tower of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, 1898, by the brilliant and short-lived Halsey Wood. Gothic was not really inspiring to Wood; he liked to fantasize in Romanesque. Here though, he did a burly variation on the 1500-period tower of a church in Wrexham, Wales.
Further away is a more correct Gothic termination, the twin spires of St. Paul’s Cathedral, completed in 1906 to designs of Egan & Prindeville (Chicago). The cathedral is a transitional building, faced in limestone, a new material to Pittsburgh, rather than customary materials of red brick and sandstone that were resigned to the local soot. Yet this is a Victorian building in basic ways. The detailing seems attached to rather than integrated with the basic masses, and the voulting inside is false.
The Cathedral of Learning was concluded in 1937 with rising masses not intended at first but that are just right for its tall, tapering form, letting it stop of its own accord.
With any shortcomings, the three buildings, and the tracery of winter trees, are a lovely sight.
—Walter C. Kidney
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Places Around Pittsburgh: He Did It Himself
The Eclectic period, from 1900 to 1940 say, witnessed a good bit of excess, not surprisingly since architecture as a whole was pretty histrionic. One has the impression, looking back, that architects, clients, and developers egged each other on and that the sense of the ridiculous quietly faded away, especially toward the end. Hyeholde, built in Moon Township between 1931 and 1938, was an Olde Worlde fantasy of a type familiar from 1925 on, but different from most in that the restaurateur William Kryskill, designed it himself. The fake half-timber, the crazy brickwork, the ravaged slating of the steep roofs, all tell of naïve peasant work that the elements have assaulted: ergo, it seems to be thoroughly professional work as it might be done by an Eclectic architect. But the stove, rather than the drawing board, was the place where William Kryskill practiced his true art.—Walter C. Kidney
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Places Around Pittsburgh: Exactly Enough
“Shingle Style” is a label invented by Vincent Scully, and the New England and Philadelphia examples he chose for his book of that name tend to be bold and sculptural, the shingles giving texture and sparkle to towers and other sweeping, curved forms. But a house at 328 Morewood Avenue shows a rather boxy form whose quiet modifications have their own artistry. Both shingles and brickwork have been painted elephant gray, as was fashionable in the 1960s, and a basement garage has eliminated the original entrance steps: but undo these things in your mind and see how the shingles have been laid, especially over the second and third floor window heads in the manner of string courses, and the presence or absence of reveal in the various openings, and you have a sense of artistry through means neither too lavish nor too meager: exactly enough. -
Vernacular Architecture
Walter C. Kidney
December, 2001“Vernacular,” granted, is an awkward term: four-syllabled, academic, viewing the subject from outside and above. But is may be the best word we have. In an Old World context, we would speak of “folk architecture.” To build in te vernacular is to respond to an objectively-stated building program in a direct, practical way, using building systems and materials ready to hand. It is not intended to be high-style architecture, and involves no major distortions or expenditures for artistic effect. Yet it can contain refinements of proportion, detailing, and finish, and can bear ornament.
If the builder of such a place is unschooled in architecture as a fine art, instinct or luck may still lead him to create a building enjoyable to the inhabitant and the passer-by, and special as a place, as an element of its neighborhood. Furthermore, architects have supplied design formulas to adopt and adapt: Palladio comes to mind at once, supplying bases for organizing a façade.
A strong vernacular is a blessing to a community: one that can cope with the cupcake-box proportions of a modern warehouse or factory, or the storage-locker multiplicity of an apartment house, or the mere habit of aluminum siding. Masterpieces are always welcome, but a good street or a beautiful urban hillside depends on many quiet good works, an adherence to a high standard of mediocrity.
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Strange Interlude in Architecture
Walter C. Kidney
December, 2001Recently, Landmarks called renewed attention to Sacred Heart Church, in Shadyside, by holding its Awards of Merit ceremony there and by giving one Award to the Church itself.
Begun in 1924 and with church construction finished in 1954, Sacred Heart virtually signaled the end of the Eclectic period of Pittsburgh architecture: a period that had begun in 1883 with H.H. Richardson’s designs for the Courthouse and Jail. The seven intervening decades, when Eclecticism developed, flourished, wavered, and began a slow deterioration, produced most of the buildings we are apt really to like. And yet, it has been under a 50-year cloud, assaulted as uncreative, fakey, even immoral, and was in time forgotten to architectural history.
Eclectic architecture can be thought of as an architecture of costumes, and in this circumstance lay its strength and its weakness. Whatever steel, concrete, or hollow tile slumbered beneath the surfaces of a building the surfaces were no mere coverings but rather an expression of the building’s role in society and the mental associations this evoked. Thus, a house might be Tudor or Colonial, or vaguely Old World while not alluding to any one place or time. A church might be Gothic, Romanesque, Colonial, or even Baroque. A school was likely to be Tudor––or Colonial. A shop, on the other hand, or a theater say, was apt to stress the cosmopolitan, to be Beaux-Arts or Art Nouveau or, in time, Moderne. In conservative Pittsburgh, architects approached the apartment house––an affair of strangers under one roof––with either manorial pretensions or an air of continental European smartness.
The couturiers of such buildings had conspicuous advantages over their Victorian predecessors. Eclecticism coincided with travel to Europe to study and sketch; with the coming of architectural schools in the United States; with the appearance of journals and books illustrating “precedents” in photographs and measured drawings; with professional organizations local and more wide in territory; and with choices of structural systems and decorative materials unknown here before. Eclecticism was an occurrence rather than an ideologically-driven movement, a matter of architects looking back to the Victorian period and thanking God it was over rather than attempting to give forms a priori to the future. If you look back on the seven Eclectic decades, you see an architecture that began fussy and uncoordinated, executed in materials that seemed resigned to such matters as Pittsburgh soot; and became lighter, simpler, more sensuous in its colors and textures, and more integrated in its details. It might be lushly elaborate, like the Cathedral of Learning, but the many details were acting more and more as parts of a unity as time progressed. For a while, domestic architecture displayed an addiction to quaintness, expressed in little towers and gabled entrances, crazy brickwork, battered slates. One may look at the houses of a 1920s suburb and wonder if such fantasy architecture was intended to blur the edges of reality for a people forbidden to relax over a Scotch or two after the business day. Apart from this Mother Goose domestic architecture, though, there was a trend toward simplification that the Depression probably furthered: Stripped Classicism for institutions, a bland Georgian for houses, a rather simplified Gothic for the churches. The 1930s witnessed completion of grand projects of the pre-Depression years, true: locally, the Cathedral of Learning, the Mellon Institute, and the East Liberty Presbyterian Church come to mind at once as lavish works of construction carried over.
Whether the price of materials and workmanship devitalized Eclecticism, or Modernist polemics, or some kind of inbred effeteness, it became a weak thing after 1940. All the Palladian windows and gables of the builders have added up to nearly nothing; they aim to be genteel, but lack taste, let alone inspiration.
Yet Eclecticism in some form is apt to return. Post-Modernism used Classical devices in an “ironic” way, and business architecture today seems to be given over to arbitrary composition and superficial ornamentation. More literacy where historical devices are involved might bring on a revival of styles and quasi-styles such as the economical ‘30s knew, if not the ampler ‘20s.